Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took on a World at War

From the LROB:

[Dorothy] Thompson’s friend the historian Stephen Graubard said ‘she was like a great ship left stranded on the beach after the tide had gone out.’ She continued to write and to publish – usually about the downfall of American morality – but her influence was never what it had been. Before the US entered the war, one of her columns had refuted Lindbergh’s claim that Jews controlled the American press. She had carefully listed the owners of major newspapers, syndicates, chains – all goyim (one exception, the New York Times, was ‘Jewish-owned’, she allowed, ‘but has an overwhelmingly gentile editorial board’). She insisted that ‘if every American Jew died tomorrow it would not make the slightest difference’ to the ‘policy’ of the press. But when she no longer commanded an audience of millions, she knew whom to blame. She wrote to Rebecca West: ‘Jews … ruthless[ly] exploit you when they can, and especially exploit your feelings of sympathy and charity, and kick you all the harder in the teeth if you cease to be of use to them, or draw back a little on being exploited.’ There’s probably a lesson in that; her younger self would have made a column out of it.